I've never seen the show itself, but recently some retrospectives and interviews came up in my recommendations. Most of what they went into seemed obvious enough, but what I really don't understand is how, at it's height, it was somehow simultaneously the most popular television show in the world, ever, and also an already cheap production that was constantly under budget constraints. The actors are telling stories about how they had no real sets, were using production spaces as doubles, and almost everyone in the cast and crew was getting paid the absolute minimum possible. One of the main consultants (and also a character in the show itself ) said he made more money fixing decks over one summer than he made in his entire run on the show. And he was on it for 10 seasons

From what I saw, a network commissioned and produced the first season, all while execs thought the entire premise was absolutely moronic and unsustainable, so they cancelled it. Then Hasselhoff stepped in and put his own money up to finance a second season independently, which is when it first became a super cheap production, because they no longer had network backing or help. That makes sense. But then the show exploded, and they were somehow still broke? Like, they were still using footage shot for the initial pitch pilot as montage filler 6 or 7 seasons deep, because they wouldn't or couldn't shoot more. They were reusing entire shots from previous episodes and seasons to create basic action scenes, the scripts were always getting hacked apart and entire subplots were reedited into each other, or just moved into a different episode where they made no sense, and the ubiquitous use of slow motion and montages (again, mostly using old footage over and over) were necessary to fill time just to get episodes to the proper length. Everything was broadcast out of order, making the most basic storylines impossible to follow. It seemed like a real shitshow

And I could totally understand if the producers had decided to say, "fuck it," because the show was already insanely popular, so why put in more than the bare minimum? Except, there was this ongoing mocking of the show because it was (until recently) the longest running series to never win an Emmy, and the producer regularly made award bait episodes where someone got cancer or something and everyone could be sad and act a lot. It seemed that they were aware of the show's reputation and wanted to gain some respect, yet wouldn't up the production values enough to earn it. And again, this was all happening while Baywatch was the biggest scripted television phenomenon not just in the USA, but the whole world. The figures they quote is that Baywatch was watched by over 1 billion people weekly, throughout about 150 countries. A billion. How the fuck could they still not manage a couple extra script wranglers and a second unit director?